ical
performances should form the regular accompaniment of a genteel
banquet. Another novelty was a dancing-school, such as Scipio
Aemilianus full of indignation describes in one of his speeches,
in which upwards of five hundred boys and girls--the dregs of the
people and the children of magistrates and of dignitaries mixed up
together--received instruction from a ballet-master in far from
decorous castanet-dances, in corresponding songs, and in the use of
the proscribed Greek stringed instruments. It was a novelty too--
not so much that a consular and -pontifex maximus- like Publius
Scaevola (consul in 621) should catch the balls in the circus as
nimbly as he solved the most complicated questions of law at home--
as that young Romans of rank should display their jockey-arts
before all the people at the festal games of Sulla. The government
occasionally attempted to check such practices; as for instance in
639, when all musical instruments, with the exception of the simple
flute indigenous in Latium, were prohibited by the censors.
But Rome was no Sparta; the lax government by such prohibitions
rather drew attention to the evils than attempted to remedy them
by a sharp and consistent application of the laws.

If, in conclusion, we glance back at the picture as a whole which
the literature and art of Italy unfold to our view from the death
of Ennius to the beginning of the Ciceronian age, we find in these
respects as compared with the preceding epoch a most decided
decline of productiveness. The higher kinds of literature--such
as epos, tragedy, history--have died out or have been arrested in
their development. The subordinate kinds--the translation and
imitation of the intrigue-piece, the farce, the poetical and prose
brochure--alone are successful; in this last field of literature
swept by the full hurricane of revolution we meet with the two men
of greatest literary talent in this epoch, Gaius Gracchus and Gaius
Lucilius, who stand out amidst a number of more or less mediocre
writers just as in a similar epoch of French literature Courier
and Beranger stand out amidst a multitude of pretentious nullities.
In the plastic and delineative arts likewise the production,
always weak, is now utterly null. On the other hand the receptive
enjoyment of art and literature flourished; as the Epigoni of
this period in the political field gathered in and used up the
inheritance that fell to their fathers, we find them in th